Jim - That's a good solution for the one-off files over 100GB, as long as I don't have to copy over all the footage I'm using (20TB+).

Eric - I didn't personally do it, but it's a 8-bay tower RAID5 Mac-formatted drive connected to a Mac Pro server via NAS. Then other Macs are connected using eithernet and AFP. Does any that answer your question?

Also, I'm going to do a test by switching from AFP to NFS to see if that solves some of the isuses.

Jounaling adds meta-data to the table for the volume and that has significant performance hits. Also there are allot of applications now that have issues with Jounaling on volumes so I would suggest you move your data off that volume and re-format it Non Jounaled. Journaling does give you greater protection to recover a volume if you have corruption so there is a trade off. However a decent raid controller should have a good enough Integrity verification process to help prevent the need for that. Just make sure you have the parity or integrity verifications scheduled.

Ulf - How does your workflow work with multiple editors and TBs of footage? Do you just have a lot of local storage, too?

Well, my projects are usualy not nat large, footage wise. The most of my projects are <250 GB so it is quite easy for me to move it from the server to my local working drive. I use shotputpro to offload my cards directly to the server from the same PC every time, and then I can draw the footage out on the others as I please, without touching the original files on the server.

My data localy is on a drive in a HDD-Tray. In this way it is easy for me to swap drives between PC's, and if the client at the end wants me to keep an editable project, I just copy everything to that drive, add the cost of the drive to the bill, and keep it.

This setup works quite good for me, but again, for larger projects with tons of footage, it might not.

Jim/Ulf - I appreciate these tips. If this is the case, though, I'm going to have to completely re-evaluate my workflow. Starting work on a documentary with other editors, and we need shared media files.

Also, the guys at www.biscardicreative.com are using PrP successfully in a shared environment. Do you think they've just engineered their system in a way to make it work? They are telling me that they just can't have the same project open on two machines at once.

It's just odd hearing different things form different editors, but I may just not be connecting all the dots correctly...

It is something that is a known issue with the way that Apple wants Adobe to use QuickTime. Using a SMB share will work, but AFP will give an error going to files over 2 GB.

And yes, we always recommend working on local files if you can. If you can't, you need to have a rock solid and fast network setup. It's related to the way that video files are processed. To build a video file you create the container then start filling in the video. If there is any type of interruption or slowing in the data flow, the file creation fails.